JACKSON, MI – As a life resident of outstate Michigan, I have a chronic weak spot on the subject of hating Detroit.

I don’t hate Detroit at all. I like it, contrary to outstate stereotype.

“Detroit still has a lot of good things,” I say. “Detroit will rise again.”

My optimism was built upon two foundation stones. First, economies and city fortunes are cyclical. Rises can follow falls, and often do. Second, the health of Detroit is crucial to the health of Michigan. Even those of us who live near cornfields and classify Carhartt as a designer label have a stake in Detroit's future.

Optimism was recently shaken by the simple act of reading a book.

The book is “Detroit City is the Place to Be,” and it's loaded with fascinating, and sometimes frightening, observations about Jackson’s neighbor 75 miles to the east.

Author Mark Binelli looks from street level at troubles so stark they are mind-boggling, but concludes by declaring himself optimistic about Detroit. My feeling was precisely the opposite.

The book mostly ignores “good things” about Detroit mentioned by people like me — flannel-clad outsiders who drive in for concerts, ballgames, casinos, or museums — as superficial gloss on a city that is astonishingly bleak.

Here’s one telling illustration: Detroit has so many empty buildings tourists regularly travel from Europe to explore the “ruins.”

“I came to see the end of the world!” a college student from Germany told Binelli outside the Packard plant, closed since 1958.

A few encouraging developments are noticed lately, but trendy solutions suggested for Detroit’s future, like urban farming, all seem doomed and a little silly. If agricultural production made cities thrive, 700,000 people would live in Springport.

There is no sense in sugar-coating: Racial divisions surrounding and infecting almost any discussion of Detroit are staggering.

Without exactly exploring it as a subject in itself, Binelli gives example after discouraging example of racial complications that work in two directions.

Huge numbers of white people, or their parents, abandoned Detroit long ago in racial flight. They commonly dismiss any effort to help the city as hopeless. The “bulldoze it and start over” mentality is entrenched.

Among black people who make an 83-percent majority of Detroit residents, even the concept of progress is commonly painted as racist if it involves an influx of white people or otherwise dilutes a sense of black power.

Detroit may rise again, but even an optimist has difficulty imagining how it can happen unless we all become a lot more color-blind.